More comics: the moving of mountains

When we moved into Valentine's Castle in the summer of 1992, I had 27 long boxes of comics plus a few boxes of comics magazines--and let me just note that the evening that I carried all 27 boxes from the moving van to my study was the single hardest work I've ever done, because I decided to do it all at once because I was really, really stupid. nellorat kept her comics in legal-width (14") filing cabinet drawers in the basement. (This is actually a really cool method for storing comics; a standard American comic is just under 7" wide and 10" tall, so each drawer can hold 2 rows standing side-by-side, like longboxes on drawers. But filing cabinets are heavy and expensive and they take more space than an equivalent volume of boxes.)

That year might have been the last time that I could honestly say our comics were organized. We've been buying comics together for two decades, and the mountain has growed and growed and growed. Last year, we started the process of trying to reclaim my sizable study from the resident pile. It was somewhere around 70 long boxes against two walls of the room when I took a week off work to pull out material to sell and do an initial, partial organization; we pulled about 24 boxes to sell at that point. They're still in the study, but in a separate pile blocking off the least important of my 3 closets-full-of-games and a bookcase of true crime paperbacks. My FLCS is finally going to take them on consignment this month. (That delay is a story in itself--the shop is the second in a relatively new two-store chain owned by two guys. The co-owner and manager of the Manhattan store strongly believes that a full-service comics shop should offer back issues, and after a year of planning they're ready to start selling them.)

Anyway, about a month ago I realized I had 10 vacation days left for this year and can only carry over 5, so I arranged to take the week between Christmas and New Year's to make the final push. Since Saturday, December 24, I have gone through the main comics mountain--now 80 short boxes--at least 3 times, alphabetizing them, pulling another 6.5 long boxes for sale, and setting aside about a third of them for nellorat's determination of what should and can go into the basement.

We're not yet done. For instance, I still need to catalog the new "for sale" items. As n. reviews the "basement" comics. many will be kicked back to the mountain, and we will discover still more duplicates to be purged, holdovers from the period where she and I maintained separate comics collections because we maintained separate households. But we're close.

Mainly I'm exhausted--I've been fighting off a cold the whole time--both n. and supergee have gotten it--and there was a lot to do this past week besides comics-wrangle. (I did have to absent myself from a New Years' Eve party because of the cold.) But that is mixed with delight that I managed to get the worst time- and space-consuming parts of the process done before having to return to work. Given that I was wildly guessing about how long it would take, I almost literally can't believe I'm done with what I've done. Yay me.

Nope! nellorat had her cold long before we saw you, and supergee clearly caught it from her. I still haven't really gotten it, mercifully--just a little congestion and tiredness. (Flushing my nose really does seem to cut down on my colds.)